Faculty
Keith Berry
Professor & Associate Chair
CV
CONTACT INFORMATION
Email
Office: CIS 3046
BIOGRAPHY
Keith Berry (PhD, Southern Illinois University) is a Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Communication.
Keith鈥檚 research dwells at the creative intersections of relational communication and cultural identity formation. He studies the ways in which conversation partners communicatively and performatively co-constitute (make and remake) ourselves in everyday social interaction and relationships, including communal ways of interacting and being that build and sustain communities and groups. Much of his research has focused on bullying, LGBTQ+ cultures and identities, and performances of reflexivity and transformations of subjectivity in research and writing that uses autoethnography, narrative, and ethnographic fieldwork and interviewing.
He is the co-author (with Joyce Hocker) of Interpersonal Conflict鈥�2025 Update (McGraw Hill) and co-author (with Catherine M. Gillotti and Tony E. Adams) of Living Sexuality: Stories of LGBTQ Relationships, Identities, and Desires (2020, Brill/Sense). His solo-authored book Bullied: Tales of Torment, Identity, and Youth (2016, Routledge) has been honored by the Ethnography Division of the National Communication Association (NCA), the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, and the Central States Communication Association. His research has also appeared in books and journals such as The Cambridge Handbook of Identity and the Handbook of Autoethnography, as well as Journal of Applied Communication Research, Text & Performance Quarterly, Qualitative Inquiry, Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies and Journal of Family Communication.
He is currently writing on mediated performances of queer joy and aging as well as the relational nature of autoethnography. Also, his next solo-authored book, a follow up to Bullied, examines the stories that parents tell about helping their children cope in the face of bullying.
Keith is an inaugural member of the Board of Trustees of the International Association of Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry (), past chair of NCA鈥檚 Ethnography Division, and past co-chair of NCA鈥檚 Anti-Bullying Task Force.
RESEARCH AREAS
Relational Communication, Culture, Identity, Bullying, Autoethnography, Reflexivity
RESEARCH clusters
Interpersonal and Relational Communication; Media, Culture, and Performance; Health Communication